Every year General Synod goes north on holiday. It takes itself mighty seriously, wallows in process and the fine detail of procedure. In an airless and windowless hall, it slowly administers neat chloroform of tedium.

There are moments, no, hours when I wonder why on earth I gave away five of the best days of the summer to sit here in York. No debates produced an outcome that will make any difference beyond the synod itself. Even the glorious absurdity of it all, spiced by gentle whimsical humour, failed to keep me awake.

There was action to be sure, but all behind the scenes. I hope, having discovered that the C of E holds £3.8m worth of shares in News Corporation, that someone puts the thumbscrews on the finance team. At one point, men in suits sweated and scurried into dark recesses, hotly pursued by a media pack. Later, a rather jolly conspiracy theory surfaced that synod enforcers had stopped people tweeting from the public gallery. It's rather a shame that turned out to be university policy, not the dark arts of the synod controllers.

However comatose, I am of good heart. There is an utterly depressing list of reasons why I should not be. A small lobby group called Changing Attitude handed out meaningfully rainbow-coloured material at the door, and I could see in their eyes the shadow of the treatment they receive from fellow Christians. There were the usual exclusive huddles of loonies plotting to take over the world. Alas, it took money to stir the heart. The sparkiest moment was when synod threw out the parochial fees order. This was but brief respite, and waffle about pensions soon re-established business as usual.

Maybe the real energy bubbles up in the fringe meetings? Do I get charged up by a lecture on how to prevent lead being stolen from my church roof? How about a worthy but tentative chat about new media? Not really.

Rowan Williams often gets a rough ride in the press and is certainly not universally understood in the parish. Neither has he always got it right. Indeed the way he succumbed to pressure and asked his friend Jeffrey John to step down just before his consecration as bishop of Reading may well still give him sleepless nights. However, being flawed and human like the rest of us doesn't stop him being one of the giants of our generation. He has a phenomenal brain. On Saturday he put that brain at the service of his heart.

He had just returned from the Congo and what he experienced obviously stirred his guts. In a period of unspeakable violence and terror local people told him: "The church did not abandon us." A sleeping lion in the archbishop stirred. He thought to himself: "If it wasn't for the church, no one, absolutely no one, would have cared, and they would be lost still. "

In the Congo, he seemed to have rediscovered something often masked by the sheer grey grind of his day job. "It was almost a fierce sense, almost an angry feeling, this knowledge that the church mattered so intensely."

Back home, the truth is that the church hardly matters at all. At a local level churches produce fabulous stories, but generally the church isn't even on the radar. The presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark, the Right Rev Peter Skov-Jakobsen, Sunday morning guest preacher, pointed out that this won't change until we sort our internal ethics. Whilst we are seen as discriminatory, racist and homophobic, it is almost impossible to convince folk that we have good news for them.

Many people in this country experience the abandonment Williams talks about as abandonment by the Church of England. The archbishop faced the problem head on. Quoting Bonhoeffer, he called on his church to search for a new kind of language for faith that could have the same revolutionary and liberating force that the words of Jesus originally had. Good grief! If we actually did that it would blow General Synod apart.

Rowan was on fire, but alongside him we met another bishop of real stature, tough and humble, intelligent and grounded – Bishop Victoria Matthews of Christchurch, New Zealand. Beneath the tedious manicured York agenda, the issue of women bishops doesn't go away. "Do you believe in women in the episcopate? Why, I've seen it done, and it rocks."